Classical:BTS
Classical BTS - S2E5 - John Paul-Buzard
Season 2 Episode 5 | 4m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
Classical BTS - Season 2 Episode 5 - John Paul-Buzard
When John Paul Buzard was only five, the organist at his church sent him into the depths of a massive pipe organ to make a minor repair. That moment defined his life's calling. Now he is one of the premier organ makers in the United States – building each instrument in downtown Champaign.
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Classical:BTS is a local public television program presented by WILL-TV
Classical:BTS
Classical BTS - S2E5 - John Paul-Buzard
Season 2 Episode 5 | 4m 40sVideo has Closed Captions
When John Paul Buzard was only five, the organist at his church sent him into the depths of a massive pipe organ to make a minor repair. That moment defined his life's calling. Now he is one of the premier organ makers in the United States – building each instrument in downtown Champaign.
Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipUnknown: I grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago.
My dad was an Episcopal priest, and at his parish was the first pipe organ I'd ever heard.
And I was five years old and absolutely smitten with the sound.
I'd never encountered a sound that could actually make the seats you were sitting on shake, I became a chorister.
And at age six, the organ malfunctioned on a Sunday.
And the organist and choir master and he looked over his Pinsent hasn't been pulled again.
So I ran across the channel, and he went upstairs to the Oregon chamber.
And he said, Now, boy, he said, I'm too old to get down this ladder, but you do exactly what I say.
And we'll fix this Oregon, and the distraction will be.
And when he opened the door, here's this hissing monster in front of me, and I'm, I'm just a little kid and a 16 foot long organ pipe is, it's, it's heroic, it's amazing.
To me, it was like, I want to do this for the rest of my life, I want to build him.
There are so many different aspects of the craft of organ building, you have to be an electrician, a plumber, a musician, a woodworker, and a metal worker, and so on, and so on.
So I have brought together the best people that I can find, that are experts in all of these different areas, in order to be able to build the kind of instruments of the quality that we do.
For everybody that's in this field.
They've come to it because they've gotten bitten by the bug.
And sometimes they get bitten later in life.
And sometimes they get bitten lucky as I was like, as a child.
What a pipe organ is, is a box of whistles.
And the speech of those whistles are controlled by keys that an organist plays, we ordered all of our metal pipes from a pipe maker in Germany, they're the absolutely the most beautiful organ pipes in the world.
Pipe organs are expensive, whether they're small or big.
And so you might as well get the largest instrument that you musically could use.
And that means that the instruments are just getting bigger and bigger, you're moving, ultimately, tons of material in order to build one of these instruments.
Typically, an organ will take us a year.
I bought this building 32 years ago, and just knew it would make a really nice organ building shop.
It's, it's tall, it's not sprawling, and so there's room in the back that we were able to create an erecting room or a building hall where we could set an entire organ up that once before we take it to the church, the pipe organ, is the one instrument that a single person can play, that will fill an entire building with sound, it's a feeling that it goes right through your body, right through your soul.
And there's no other instrument that can do that.
There is a great importance that we place on legitimacy in sound in art and craft, and then how that translates to your ability to worship.
The pipe organ is with us from our beginning, to our end and all of the milestone movements in between during our lives.
And to be able to have one of my instruments be there for a typical family or a generation of families.
It's tremendously meaningful.
The organs that I'm that I'm drawing here, when they're built, they'll build they'll be there for 100 years and to think that you know, my name is still going to be on the console on a nice bone plate.
That's, that's why we do it.
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Classical:BTS is a local public television program presented by WILL-TV